By Mamta Dagar, Certified Sports Nutritionist
A healthy weight loss plan completely depends on ones nutrition and exercise. It is simply the process of calories in and out. Eating right gives your body the right kind of nutrition and enough energy to workout. Working out consistently helps you burn calories and toning of muscles.
There might be the time when you will see after following right nutrition and workout plan, weighing scale does not seem to budge but you observe a drop in size (inches). Inch loss feels so good. Isn’t? that is the beauty of losing weight with burning the calories.
A common assumption is that when you step on the weighing scale and you weigh a certain number and after a few days or months if that number drops you consider the weight loss as an indication of a positive step towards fitness and good health. For the common man losing weight is equivalent to being fit and healthy but that is not true.
It is important to bear in mind that both numbers and inches have a combined role to play in your fitness journey but one must understand the role each factor has to play and view it in the right perspective.
Inch loss vs. Weight Loss:
A weighing scale shows you your weight without telling you the crucial details of the components of the total weight. You do not come to know the weight of muscle, fat, water, bones separately. A weighing scale can be misleading.
Understanding the science and logic behind weight loss and inch loss can change the basic concept of your understanding of fitness and good health.
Inch loss on the other hand apart from making you look slimmer, giving you an aesthetic body, spurs you on towards your fitness goals.
Inch loss is reflected around the typical areas of fat storage like the waist, hips and thighs and need not be linked to weight loss. It is possible to lose inches with or without weight loss. In a few exceptions you may lose inches and actually gain weight, as muscle is far denser than fats.
How to Measure?
Stepping on to weighing scale is not the right way to know you are moving towards right direction or not? Checking everyday and getting positive and negative feeling from that weight scale number is not a good thing for your mental health.
If your goal is to get fit, then measuring your,
are more appropriate ways to know your healthy status. Dropping fat percentage is the healthy sign for a fit or aesthetic body goal. You can click on the tool names to track your present fitness level and goals.
The Bottom Line:
You fitness goal should be attaining healthy weight instead of just weight loss. For keeping a track on your goal, Instead of using the scale as a measure of your fitness progress, a focus on losing inches and observing how your clothes fit you seems to be a better option.